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Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

I find it strange how preachy a part of HN can get about less CO2 emissions and being eco-friendly but then unequivocally support en extremely eco-unfriendly initiative like physically destroying usable storage devices.

If you have principles, this is your litmus test. Show everyone that your principles hold even when there's a risk for you (and that risk is only perceived IMO, and not real if you have good procedures in place; and if you don't have those then you are at risk of many other problems).

Personally I don't find it that hard to have a designated "hard drive exit area" where 1-2 guys' job is basically plugging in HDDs and running `shred` on them (which overwrites them with random data in several passes) all day long.

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> If you have principles, this is your litmus test

Principles are often in conflict. There are multiple reasonable solutions to this problem.

You can have principles you desire to follow but still legally have to follow NIST 800-88. Can even add feedback to future iterations of the publication and attempt to get it changed in the future. Doesn't change the current requirement though.

And running a "shred" with multiple passes requires hardware and electricity to run, which needs to be maintained and scaled to such a level that the process could be done within a reasonable timeframe. Large drives these days could take multiple days each to run plus verification time. And now scale that to thousands of drives. That's a lot of additional hardware and electricity. Where recycling the shredded drive feels more eco friendly. But don't have any actual numbers to support that. Would definitely be interested in actual numbers and how things would play out big picture.

> "They have a zero-risk policy. It can't be one in a million drives, one in 10 million drives, one in 100 million drives that leaks. It has to be zero."

At some point human error will kick in, a firmware bug will prevent a complete override of the disk, or some new technology will be able to detect overridden data.

Yes but shredding the drives isn't zero risk either. For example, there is a risk a disk would be stolen before it reaches the shredding place.

So measure the risk probability and show it to me?

There are multiple ways to shred. When you get drives from the bank, they have a semi down in the parking lot doing it on site. Other companies tag each device then document each one getting tossed in the shredder. If one of these devices shows back up after destruction then there is going to be some legal hell to pay.

It's nearly impossible to tell if a disk has been erased by looking at it from the outside. But a shredded device, well that's easy enough.

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